The Big Five(OCEAN) Personality Traits

Abstract

Projects are done by people and for people. Good project management is about how to organize people efficiently involving positions and tasks assigning, ways of communication, meeting people's satisfaction, etc.

Personality traits play an important role in people management, which have a big influence on success, efficiency, satisfaction, risk attitudes, performance, and more of projects. Since in a project, people have different backgrounds, interests, and personalities that make people think and manage the tasks in a different way and increase risks of conflicts somehow. A good perception of employees’ personality traits is a key for project managers to organize and design their teams. The similar and complementary personality traits make people, from different backgrounds and interests, well connected in a project and highly affect how and what they do in a project. Similarly, the action and decisions that project managers made are impacted by personality traits, which are not related to the technical part. It also influences how project managers deal with the relationship of different stakeholders.

The so-called big five (OCEAN) personality traits theory is considered the dominant approach for representing the human trait structure today. Researchers have used the theory to predict individual differences in numerous settings: clinical (reviewed in Costa, 1991), industrial and organizational (e.g., Barrick & Mount, 1991, 1996; Barry & Stewart, 1997; Mount & Barrick, 1995), counseling (McCrae & Costa, 1991), and more .It was founded by Fiske (1949) and later expanded and elaborated by Norman (1967), Smith (1967), Goldberg (1981), and McCrae and Costa (1987). This theory contains five basic factors that are Openness, Conscientiousness, Extraversion, Agreeableness, Neuroticism.